Traditionally, products and services provided in the communications, media and energy world have complex pricing structures with multiple price types per product, tier-based pricing, 2-part tariffs, et cetera. Deregulation, globalization, and the convergence of technologies, have broken down barriers and intensified the competition. As a result, companies in this space responded with innovative and even more complex product bundles and pricing schemes. These pricing schemes are constantly evolving to keep up with the competition and to adapt to the target market's needs.
Rate plans or rate tables are the corner stones of any Communications and Energy companies' usage based pricing scheme. The rates often varies by service, region, time of the day or year (e.g. day, night, weekends, summer, winter), and even payment methods, payment duration, credit risk, et cetera. These complex rate plans are usually maintained in external billing and pricing systems, to be matched up with the actual consumer usage for the generation of a telephone or utilities bill.
However, in order to compete, companies wish to be able to provide competitive bids. That is complicated, since the pricing schemes are complex, and generally the user does not know their usage data precisely.